The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 5 - Lies Upon Lies

I stared at the Alpha, utterly horrified. Surely, I'd heard him wrong. Surely, he meant Kara and he had just been looking at me by accident. He couldn't be my mate.

And yet the guard jumped away from me like I had burnt him. He backed up a few steps, ducked his head, and tried not to breathe. All while I stood there, the handcuffs dangling from my wrist. Gaping at the man who was claiming me as his soulmate. It would cost me nothing to humour him, though, right? This was the best chance I had of escaping. If I went along with it and pretended like I did want to play happy families with him, I would get a chance to run sooner or later.

This was the man who would have tortured me in an hour or two. This was the man whose pack had its own private prison. This was the man who had instructed his fighters to attack and imprison anyone who set as much as a toe over the border. Even if he thought I was his mate, I had to be careful around him.

"I..." I began hesitantly. And no, I didn't get any further than that for an embarrassingly long time, but could you blame me? I was feeling more than a little flustered. "Um. Hi."

"Hi," he replied quietly. "We can go somewhere and talk, if you want. I think that might be a good idea."

I looked around properly for the first time since he had uttered that life-changing sentence, and then I bit my lip. "What about my friend?"

Anything to buy me a few seconds more to think.

He barely glanced in Kara's direction. "Tyler, can you take this young woman to the canteen and get her something to eat? We'll come and find you when we're ready."

The youngest of the guys nodded without any hesitation whatsoever. "Sure, Jace."

Kara looked at me quizzically, and I gave her a little nod to let her know that she should go with them and behave herself. I was trying to stay calm and rational, and that seemed like the calm and rational thing to do. While she was safe and being fed, I could untangle this mess.

The guards could hardly leave quickly enough. Kara was allowed to walk with them, her hands uncuffed, but I did notice how closely they were all watching her. When they had disappeared down the corridor, Kara throwing me a sceptical backwards glance along the way, I was left alone with the Alpha. Jace, they'd called him. The name suited him, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on.

He had been intimidating in a corridor full of people. Now that we were alone, I tried not to look at him very much. He had a strong wolf - I could feel the energy from it in the air between us, crackling and fizzing and setting my own wolf on edge. The one redeeming factor, the one reason my heart was still beating slow and steadily, was that he was very ... calm. When he did move, it was always with slow, carefully measured movements.

"Emma - is it?" he asked. He was trying to be gentle with me. That much was obvious. I wondered if his heart was beating as fast as mine was under that cool exterior. "There's a place we can go. It's just down the corridor. Do you see that blue door?"

I glanced at him warily. "How do you know my name?"

A little shrug. "Is it a secret?"

"No," I allowed. But I would still like to know, given that I hadn't told his men.

Jace didn't offer me anything by way of explanation. We were walking alongside each other, but he kept sneaking glances in my direction, until he eventually murmured, "You're very beautiful, you know."

"You would think that," I said, smiling at him. Best to play along properly. I sincerely doubted I looked beautiful with fresh wounds on my face. I hadn't had a chance to shower properly in months. And I knew that even at the best of times, beautiful wasn't a word that anyone would often use to describe me. I wasn't insecure about how I looked - not like I'd been at twelve or thirteen years old. But I also wasn't delusional.